Loyle Carner – Yesterday’s Gone

Last year, Loyle Carner took issue on Twitter with a Guardian writer who had described him as the “sentimental face of grime”, and you can see his point. Ten years ago, Carner would have been a worthy cult figure, but in 2017 his debut album Yesterday’s Gone made the Top 20. He has clearly benefitted from the way grime’s resurgence has raised the profile of and broadened the audience for UK hip-hop, but artistically he has little in common with Skepta or Stomzy. His lyrics are introverted, self-effacing and regretful, filled with small, telling details rather than braggadocio; his music is downbeat and wistful, employing samples similar to the library music played in the background of the TV testcard. Yesterday’s Gone is a hip-hop album filled with subtlety and nuance; it gradually works its way under your skin rather than clobbering you around the head. It might be unlikely to win the 2017 Mercury, but that has nothing to do with its quality and everything to do with last year’s winner. However much the judges claim all that matters is the music, they’re unlikely to reward two rap albums on the trot for fear of accusations of genre bias. Alexis Petridis

The Big Moon – Love in the 4th Dimension

“Sometimes I think guitar bands aren’t cool any more,” the Big Moon vocalist-guitarist Juliette “Jules” Jackson told me earlier this year, a hint of self-deprecation peeking out from behind her canny frontwoman persona. Luckily for her, the twentysomething London four-piece are one of the few UK acts making guitar music feel fresh again, as this debut album shows. Its riot grrrl energy and grungy fuzz are complemented by a pop polish inspired by the band’s love of everyone from Toni Braxton to Madonna, who they often cover live. Although Jackson and bandmates Celia, Soph and Fern happily recall 90s female-fronted acts, the Big Moon have a feminist agency that those bands sometimes lacked, especially when singing about a guy drinking pineapple juice to make his semen taste better (Cupid) or losing the feeling in your nipples (Silent Movie Susie). While it’s an outsider bet – it peaked at number 66 in the charts – Love in the 4th Dimension is wry, retro and a definite contender. Hannah J Davies

Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer

Like all the best musicians, Stormzy’s brilliance spills out of his records and infects the culture at large. Whether furnishing Love Island with storylines or making the news with his bald political commentary, the Croydon rapper has contributed energy, intelligence and humour to the national conversation in a way that the other nominees could only dream of (laughing at Galway Girl doesn’t count). But all that is just a bonus – his album Gang Signs & Prayer was both a commercial and artistic triumph, proof that Stormzy has worked out how to take grime mainstream without compromising its darkness or subtlety. It also confirmed the rapper’s status as the best UK lyricist in a generation – his tracks are dense, clever and hugely funny, operating on a far higher plane than comrades like Skepta. Considering the latter won last year, a victory for Stormzy is the only one that makes sense – he reminds us of the joy of a performer with an actual personality. Rachel Aroesti

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Kate Tempest – Let Them Eat Chaos

Since Kate Tempest’s first Mercury nomination, for her 2014 debut Everybody Down, the poet/musician/playwright/novelist has hurtled from largely unknown outsider to (at time of writing) bookies’ favourite, which reflects her enduring ability to capture a shifting zeitgeist. Let Them Eat Chaos sets a cast of ordinary Londoners and their daily struggles against a global backdrop of greed, alienation, xenophobia, climate change and anxiety about the future. The album gives wider context to everyday lives while underlining the human cost of distant political decisions; at the same time as giving a powerful voice to the rise of activism now gathering pace around the world. Let Them Eat Chaos would work as spoken word – indeed it’s a simultaneous volume of poetry – but with Tempest’s words (“the people are dead in their lifetimes, dazed in the shine of the streets…”) darting over an edgy, mesmeric backdrop of minimalist electronics, electro-folk and post-dubstep, it would be a deserving winner.Dave Simpson

J Hus – Common Sense

One of the stated aims of the Mercury prize is to “provide a snapshot of the year in music”, and J Hus’s debut album Common Sense does that better than anything else on the shortlist. Empowered in part by the breakthroughs of last year’s winner Skepta and this year’s nominee Stormzy, black British music has become ever more cosmopolitan, drawing on US rap, west African pop and African-Caribbean dancehall. J Hus embodies that current diasporic tendency, and does so with the leg-humping horn of an adolescent puppy. He constantly underlines his ugliness, and then shows it to be no barrier to receiving oral sex while eating breakfast cereal; he devises the filthiest, most brilliant use ever of “cat got your tongue”. But he also shows that “sometimes I’m evil” on the ferocious drill of Clartin, and reflects on crime and poverty with bracing candour throughout. Invariably it all gets routed back to women, such as when he laments not being able to receive nudes on his brick phone. J Hus is 2017 in a snapshot, and his roadman lust would make him a hugely charismatic winner.Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Dinosaur – Together As One

Jazz at the Mercurys is like the vegan option at Mr Hogg’s XXL Jumbo Steakhouse: everyone’s happy for it to be on the menu, but there’s zero chance of anyone plumping for it when it’s time to order. Which is perhaps understandable – the Mercury prize after all is about the new and exciting, and jazz is often perceived as something for the Friday night BBC2 crowd to nod sagely along to (see also: folk). However, that way of thinking dismisses the fact that several recent jazz selections have been thrilling – most notably last year’s Channel the Spirit by the Comet Is Coming, a violently danceable album of Sun Ra-ish astral skronk. This year’s jazz effort, Together As One by twentysomething trumpeter Laura Jurd’s quartet Dinosaur, isn’t quite as out there, but it’s still worth celebrating. Mixing the bleary sounds of Miles Davis’s 70s electric period with flamenco, folk and even a bit of experimental math-rock, it’s the sort of deft, inventive fare that confounds stereotypes of the genre. At a time when jazz has some commercial relevance thanks to Kamasi Washington’s Kendrick Lamar collaborations, a Dinosaur win would feel of the moment and would honour the prize’s tradition of swinging the odd curveball (such as 2009 winner Speech Debelle). If nothing else, it would be better than sodding Blossoms. Gwilym Mumford

Sampha – Process

Given the company Sampha keeps – Frank Ocean, Kanye West – the south London producer doesn’t seem like an underdog. Drake extensively sampled one of his songs. Solange Knowles solicited his input on her recent album A Seat at the Table. As a quavery soul man, he first made his name as one of SBTRKT’s many voices. Sampha’s own debut is an uncommon beauty, touched by the quicksilver of greatness and a deep sense of unease. It is indelibly coloured by his mother’s death from cancer and his fears for his own health. Process is not the debut of a smug international jet-setter, but the internal weather report of an uncertain human, original and full of unexpected little rustles, koras and east Asian tones. Combining tear-jerking piano ballads – the conventionally beautiful (No One Knows) Me Like the Piano – with restless avant-garde touches, it is full of love: filial, romantic and thwarted.Kitty Empire